This section contains 5,662 words (approx. 19 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: "O'Casey, the Style and the Artist," in "Since O'Casey" and Other Essays on Irish Drama, Colin Smythe, 1983, pp. 62-77.
Hogan is an American playwright, educator, and critic. In the following excerpt, he discusses O'Casey's "expressionistic" use of rhetorical, dramatic, and stylistic artifice, which sharply contrasts with the more familiar methods of realism.
The style of O'Casey's plays has evoked two quite disparate reactions. Critics such as T. R. Henn, Raymond Williams, Ronald Peacock and Moody Prior, who are more concerned with drama as literature than as theatre, disparage it. As, for instance, Prior says [in The Language of Tragedy, 1964], 'On occasion, O'Casey introduces speeches in a prose more elaborate and mannered than that which serves for most of the dialogue in the play, and the effect is almost invariably one of sentimental effusiveness which seems to encourage the poetic cliché.' On the other hand, critics such...
This section contains 5,662 words (approx. 19 pages at 300 words per page) |